American Men of Action | Page 9

Ferdinand and
Isabella, and invited to sit in their presence while he told the wonderful
story of his discoveries.

Wonderful indeed! Yet what a dizziness would have seized that
audience could they have guessed the truth! Could they have guessed
that the proud kingdom of Spain was but an insignificant patch
compared with the vast continent Columbus had discovered and upon
which a score of nations were to dwell.
The life-work of the great navigator practically ended on the day he
told his story to the court of Spain, for, though he led three other
expeditions across the ocean, the discoveries they made were of no
great importance. Not a trace did he find of that golden country, which
he sought so eagerly, and at last, broken in health and fortune, in
disfavor at court, stripped of the rewards and dignities which had been
promised him, he died in a little house at Valladolid on the twentieth of
May, 1506. He believed to the last that it was the Indies he had
discovered, never dreaming that he had given a new continent to the
world.
Yet is his fame secure, for the task which he accomplished was unique,
never to be repeated. He had robbed the Sea of Darkness of its terrors,
and while those who followed him had need of courage and resolution,
it was no longer into the unknown that they sailed forth. They knew
that there was no danger of sailing over the edge and dropping off into
space; they knew that there were no dragons, nor monsters, nor other
blood-curdling terrors to be encountered, but that the other side of the
world was much like the side they lived on. That was Columbus's great
achievement. To cross the Atlantic, perilous as the voyage was, was
after all a little thing; but actually to _start_--to surmount the wall of
bigotry and ignorance which, for centuries, had shut the west away
from the east, to surmount that wall and throw it down by a faith which
rose superior to human belief and incredulity and terror of the
unknown--there was the miracle!
* * * * *
Many there were to follow, each contributing his mite toward the task
of defining the new continent. Perhaps you have seen a photographic
negative slowly take shape in the acid bath--the sharp out-lines first,
then, bit by bit, the detail. Just so did America grow beneath the gaze of

Europe, though two centuries and more were to elapse before it stood
out upon the map clean-cut and definite from border to border.
First to follow Columbus, and the first white men since the vikings to
set foot on the North American continent, which Columbus himself had
never seen, were John and Sebastian Cabot, Italians like their
predecessor, but in the service of the King of England and with an
English ship and an English crew prophetic of the race which was, in
time, to wrest the supremacy of the continent from the other nations of
Europe. They explored the coast from Newfoundland as far south,
perhaps, as Chesapeake Bay, and upon their discoveries rested the
English claim to North America, though they themselves are little more
than faint and ill-defined shadows upon the page of history, so little do
we know of them.
And just as the New World was eventually to be dominated by a nation
other than that which first took possession of it, so was it to be named
after a man other than its discoverer: an inconsiderable adventurer
named Amerigo Vespucci, a Florentine, who accompanied three or four
Spanish expeditions as astronomer or pilot, but who had no part in any
real discovery in the New World. He wrote a number of letters
describing the voyages which he claimed to have made, and one of
these was printed in a pamphlet which had a wide circulation, so that
Vespucci's name came to be connected in the public mind with the new
land in the west much more prominently than that of any other man. In
1502, in a little book dealing with the new discoveries, the suggestion
was made that there was nothing "rightly to hinder us from calling it
[the New World] Amerige or America, i.e., the land of Americus," and
America it was thenceforward--one of the great injustices of history.
Since it had to be so, let us be thankful that it was Vespucci's first name
which was selected, and not his last one.
Meanwhile, the Spaniards had pushed their way across the Caribbean
and explored the shores of the gulf, finding at last in Mexico a land of
gold. World-worn, disease-racked Ponce de Leon, conqueror and
governor of Porto Rico, struggled through the everglades of Florida,
seeking the fountain of eternal youth, and getting his death-wound

there instead.